Running Dedalus with MPI on a MacBook Pro with M2 chip (Sequoia)

[Caroline T.]

Hello, 

I’ve been trying to get Dedalus running in parallel on macOS (Apple Silicon), and I’ve run into persistent problems. The serial version of Dedalus (in a dedalus3 Conda environment) works fine, but either mpiexec hangs silently or I get low-level MPI errors, even with minimal MPI test scripts (not involving Dedalus). It seems like installing dedalus somehow interferes with the MPI stack. I’ve tried MPICH, OpenMPI via Conda and Homebrew, and even rebuilding mpi4py — all with inconsistent or broken results.

Has anyone successfully run Dedalus with MPI on Apple Silicon? If so, I’d be very grateful to hear what worked for you — environment setup, package versions, or any workaround. Thanks in advance!

Caroline